The present invention relates in general to online Internet advertising optimization, and more specifically to analysis of relationships between web browser agent data and characteristics and behavior of website visitors.
There are many advertising systems and methods which are used to select advertisements for display on Internet websites. These advertising systems use various strategies and logic to select which products and/or services may be of interest to an individual website visitor and how advertisements for the selected products should appear within a website. There are many competing ideas and many different approaches to designing the logic which is used to select and display the advertising.
One such strategy is based on data which is collected for each website visitor. In this strategy, a unique identifier (commonly, an Internet browser cookie) is downloaded from the website to the visitors computer. This unique identifier allows the advertising system to tag the visitor and recognize the visitor's visits to the website as a discrete individual. Further, data observed during the visit to the website is collected and stored in a data base and indexed to the unique identifier. This allows the advertising network to cross reference the stored data about the visitor in the database each time the visitors computer requests a web page. Observing a visitor's habits allows the advertising network to better determine which ads to display based on the stored data. A website may also retrieve visitor preferences and interests stored at the website by identifying a returning visitor. The different kinds of data which may be gathered and the means of referencing the data based on the users identifier are important aspects of the strategy.
One common way to gather visitor interests is to observe the visitor's path through the website and noting the topics of the pages which the visitor views. Another way to gather data is to request that the visitor fill out a survey and then store the survey information for future use by the advertising system when the visitor returns. A third common way to gather this data is by saving information supplied by the visitor when purchasing goods. Oftentimes, the billing address given at the conclusion of an e-commerce transaction can be used to purchase demographic data from companies which compile such information on a wide basis. Thus, there are several existing approaches to collecting and referencing data for online advertising systems.
There are several concerns and problems with known methods of data collection and indexing. One overarching issue is that the visitor's privacy is threatened by the combined data gathering. Another potential issue is that the cookie used to store the visitor's unique identifier resides on the visitor's computer system. Visitors often delete these cookies and thereby defeat the ability to recognize repeat visits. In addition, due to privacy concerns, a market has developed for software applications which remove cookies placed by advertising systems. The result of removing the unique identifying cookie is that the advertising network can no longer reference information stored in the database for that visitor, and may incorrectly identify future visits by the same visitor as an additional visitor.